While UV reactor designs, within which photolytic and photocatalytic decontamination of contaminated fluid media takes place, are plentiful, the up-scaling with regard to reactor size of UV reactors typically leads to significant reactor performance issues. As such, while small-scale reactors of various designs and layouts may work well, the same designs do not translate well into large-scale equipment. For example, conventional reactor designs that provide its contaminated media flow along a single, long chamber immediately suffer from size constraints of the equipment when up-scaled. Such reactors provide for the flow of contaminated media to be in a single chamber (i.e., in series) while a plurality of UV lamps are provided in parallel within this single flow chamber. West Besin's Trojan UV reactor is an example of this conventional design.
Within this type of reactor design, the parallel UV lamps illuminate in radiating circular patterns, as illustrated in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 shows the conventional design of multiple (e.g., four) UV lamps 110 placed in parallel within a single flow chamber 120. Because light radiates radially, FIG. 1 illustrates how in this conventional reactor chamber design, there are some spots (“blind spots”) with no irradiation and other spots with overkill radiation (where irradiation overlaps) when using multiple lamps in parallel within a single flow chamber through which contaminated fluid media is passed. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a reactor design having irradiated flow chambers that does not suffer from the deficiencies of the prior art designs.